Government Employee Unions 2.0
The mechanism for this latest union power grab is extremely clever. First, unions work with friendly politicians to relabel groups of independent workers as “government employees.” Then, with a few tweaks of the law, they unionize them.1 With favors from government officials, the unions can unionize almost anyone.
Union growth has exploded thanks to this new model for organizing—which we will call Government Employee Unions 2.0. As we will see in this chapter, government employee unions have already captured home health-care workers and home child-care providers—who are often just parents receiving government benefits to take care of their disabled children or people taking care of their own elderly parents.
But the government employee unions have bigger plans—to unionize other groups that receive payments from the government related to their work. Unions have their sights set on the millions of health-care workers who will receive government funds under Obamacare and the large groups of Americans that receive government benefits.
No doubt unions will try to extend the model as far as possible, since it’s filling their bank accounts with additional union dues.
But first, let’s look at what the government employee unions have already done to home-care providers in many states across the nation.
Union Boss 2.0
Andy Stern, the SEIU’s president until 2010, is widely considered a union visionary. During his tenure, Stern is credited with developing the new strategy for unionizing whole new groups of workers.2
Stern always has seemed a little too white collar to be a hard-elbowed union official—he is the son of a lawyer from New Jersey. Unlike labor leaders of old, “Stern was part of a generation of idealistic union leaders who came to organized labor from college, not the factory floor,” the New Republic reports.3 Stern went to the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, where he started at the Wharton School of Business, but finished up with a degree in education and urban planning.4 He quickly climbed the ladder of success, finally taking over the presidency of the SEIU in 1996.
Stern and the new generation of labor officials like him, referred to sometimes as the “Ivy League Amigos,”5 used their business training to turn their unions into competitive and growing enterprises. Stern cleaned house, merged many local affiliates, and centralized power in the SEIU Washington headquarters. The result has been a more modern and efficient union that stays on message. But Stern has many critics within the union movement, who say that Stern operated his union like a dictatorship and didn’t pay enough attention to the interests of rank-and-file members.6
Stern has a history of innovative union tactics. In one case, after trying aggressive tactics to unionize nursing homes owned by Beverly Enterprises in the 1980s and early 1990s, Stern tried a new strategy—selling the employer on the SEIU’s value as a political operative and lobbyist. Stern explained, “With Beverly, we could both appreciate that there were certain things we did better together—lobbying for more staffing and higher wages. That was the basis of our partnership.”7 Once Stern explained to employers the benefit of partnering with the SEIU—that the union could call in its political clout on the employer’s behalf—employers often chose to let the SEIU unionize their workforces without a fight. The SEIU’s move deeper into lobbying was a win-win for unions and employers. Of course, it was a loss for taxpayers, who had to pay for the government largesse lobbied for by the SEIU—but Stern and Co. weren’t exactly concerned about those poor souls.
In 2005, Stern pulled the SEIU out of the AFL-CIO federation of labor unions and founded a new rival union federation called Change to Win. The Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers, and several other unions joined him. This break with the AFL-CIO was good for the SEIU for two reasons. First, the SEIU saved paying the considerable annual fees to the AFL-CIO by opening its own umbrella group, which it controlled. Second, the SEIU was no longer bound by AFL-CIO anti-raiding policies, which would have prevented it from trying to attract members of other AFL-CIO–affiliated unions to switch to SEIU unions. Once it dropped out of the AFL-CIO, the SEIU was free to raid the memberships of AFL-CIO–affiliated unions, which it has done from time to time.8
The SEIU’s new labor federation, Change to Win, focused on searching for new groups to unionize. It’s also shifted the union business model from collective bargaining toward lobbying. In Stern’s own words, “We have to be a voice for something much bigger than our own members.” The New Republic explained Stern’s vision: “The role of a union is not simply to represent its workers, but to fight for all workers—including those who are not unionized themselves—by pushing for social and political changes that benefit laborers across the country.” In other words, Change to Win was going to be a broad lobbying organization for America’s workers.
On its website, Change to Win proclaims, “If corporations can join together to hire an army of lobbyists, working and middle-class Americans must also band together and restore balance by making sure we have a strong voice and a seat at the table again.”9
Stern had grand plans for Change to Win and the SEIU, but the SEIU would need more dues income to implement them. That meant looking for new groups to unionize. So Stern led the SEIU headfirst into a huge campaign to unionize a new group of self-employed workers, home-care providers. To do this, the SEIU would have to put into place special legal arrangements to transform these independent care providers into state “employees” so they could be unionized. It required a big leap, but nothing that the union couldn’t clear.
For Their Own Good
The unions’ plan was cleverly planned and conceived: they preyed on two groups of self-employed workers who received funds from the state but were not themselves government workers. First, unions targeted care providers who took care of the elderly, infirm, and disabled in their homes. Then, they selected child-care providers who care for children in their own homes as their second target. The SEIU seems to have planned on completing a unionization drive without the providers having time to organize a resistance movement against them. But they had one obstacle–these providers didn’t work for a common employer and weren’t government employees, either, so they couldn’t be unionized under current law.10 But the unions always find a way.
The SEIU faced competition from other unions, who were fighting for the same turf for their dues-collection business. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and later some other unions, tried to muscle in on the care providers. The SEIU and AFSCME rival local unions even took their fight to the sandbox, badgering child-care providers to sign cards for the union on the playground while they were tending children.11 Finally, the SEIU and AFSCME reached an agreement to divide up the states between them instead of fighting over the same territory—a union version of the Missouri Compromise, which divided up America’s Western territories into free and slave territories to avoid civil war.12 In this same way, by minimizing noisy union skirmishes and identifying their turf, both unions could pursue their goals quickly and stealthily.
But how could Stern sell this power grab to the public? The SEIU developed a terrific story: the union was taking these poor, downtrodden care providers into their membership for their own good, creating a humanitarian movement to help this “traditionally poorly paid and isolated workforce” find a voice.13
Women, minorities, and immigrants are heavily represented in these groups of care providers. Because liberals paternalistically think that these populations need special representatives to defend their interests, liberals buy into forced representation of those populations by unions. Pro–labor union academics, for example, call these drives “social movement organizing,” as if somehow a social justice movement and a union movement came together in harmony. Just coincidentally, of course, this new unionizing movement just happens to be the most successful and lucrative drive in decades for the unions.14 But that couldn’t be the SEIU’s whole purpose, could it?
B
lago Chronicles
Let’s look at how the SEIU plan played out in Illinois in 2002.
Democrat governor Rod Blagojevich, who would later go to jail for trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, helped out his good buddies and political supporters at the SEIU. Chicago SEIU Local 880, the local union that Barack Obama worked for, had proclaimed that it stood for tens of thousands of Illinois home-care providers. But in reality, these workers couldn’t actually be unionized under the law. Until Governor Blagojevich made it possible.
SEIU Local 880 wasn’t just any local union. Local 880 had deep ties with the now-defunct scandalous political organization ACORN. And as the union’s association with ACORN might suggest, Local 880 union officials certainly weren’t going to let a little thing like federal or state labor law get between them and all those juicy union dues.
And so, the union found a political way in. SEIU Local 880’s first drive was for 20,000 “personal assistants” of severely disabled people in Illinois. Personal assistants work for the disabled people themselves, not the state, but are partially or fully paid for with government programs that pay for their care.15 Many of the personal assistants are actually close relatives of the people for whom they care. But because the providers were at least partially paid using government money, the union claimed that the assistants were “state employees” and could be unionized.
In order to get them unionized, the union needed the governor’s help. Fortunately, the SEIU had supported his campaigns for years. In his race for governor, Blagojevich reportedly received $800,000 in cash from SEIU entities, plus huge amounts of soft-dollar support such as union phone bank support, mailings, and get-out-the-vote drives.16 The SEIU had delivered the election for Blagojevich. Now, it was the new governor’s turn to deliver the personal assistants over to the union.
In March 2003, just a few weeks after his inauguration, Governor Blagojevich issued an executive order allowing the SEIU to unionize these personal assistants.17 The executive order put the legal structure in place to allow these assistants to be unionized—and to allow SEIU Local 880 to be recognized as the collective bargaining agent for all such assistants in Illinois.18
Unbelievably, the state of Illinois certified the union as the exclusive representative for personal assistants despite the fact that personal assistants had never had the opportunity to vote on whether or not they wanted to be under control of the union. The SEIU bosses didn’t even conduct a perfunctory card check to show that the personal assistants were interested in being unionized, let alone win a secret-ballot election. Instead, Governor Blagojevich took the SEIU officials’ word that the union was supported by a majority of personal assistants and unionized the whole lot of them.19 As Andy Stern later admitted, Governor Blagojevich’s personal support for this campaign to unionize personal assistants was pivotal to its success.20 Shortly after certifying the union, the state of Illinois notified personal assistants that they would have to pay dues to the SEIU local affiliate to keep their jobs.21
Let’s let Rush Limbaugh recap. “It’s not complicated, it just sounds unbelievable,” Rush told his audience in November 2011. “You are a parent, Joe Schmo, and your wife, Molly Schmo, and you have a mentally disabled adult child, and so you accept Medicaid payment. Guess what? You are now a member of the SEIU. You have no choice, and a portion of what Medicaid gives you to care for your child now gets thrown back to SEIU in the form of union dues. That money then ends up back in the traditional money laundering operation, the Democrat Party.”22
The personal-care assistants may have lost out from this backroom deal, but the SEIU came out way ahead. The SEIU local union that represents Illinois’s twenty thousand personal assistants rakes in at least $3.6 million a year in forced dues from these workers.23
Next Steps
While former SEIU president Andy Stern can rightfully take the credit for pioneering the Government Employee Unions 2.0 strategy, others have caught on, including AFSCME and the United Auto Workers (UAW). The UAW is a hybrid private sector/government employee union that now represents fifty thousand government employees, with home-care workers a significant and growing part of its business. And there is some serious dues income available to unions in this market. Fourteen states have authorized unions to represent home-care providers, almost all with forced-dues provisions.24
An SEIU local affiliate in Los Angeles County forcibly unionized seventy-four thousand local workers caring for elderly and disabled residents in their homes. To pull off this feat, the SEIU had “poured millions” into the campaigns of politicians for ten years beforehand.25 The SEIU local union was certified as the workers’ representative even though barely more than 20 percent of the eligible voters actually mailed in a ballot in the union election.26 Many personal assistants reported that they had never even heard of this union until it began confiscating dues from them. That’s union democracy in action, folks!
In Michigan, AFSCME and the UAW launched a similar campaign to unionize home-based day-care providers statewide.27 Just like the personal assistants, Michigan’s home day-care providers set their own hours, work at home, and even negotiate their own rates with the families of the children they care for. The providers are partially or fully paid from the families’ government subsidies for child care.
Again, political allies gave the unions the creative legal structures needed to convert these care providers into “government employees” who could be unionized. In Michigan, for example, Democrat governor Jennifer Granholm was ready to pull as many strings as necessary for the unions to make this happen. In July 2006, Michigan created a shell corporation that would be the “employer” of the day-care providers so that they could be considered “state employees” for the limited purposes of unionizing them. A mail-in ballot union election was held. Fewer than 15 percent of the day-care providers voted in favor of the union, but the union won the election and was certified as the representative of all 40,500 providers. After the state started deducting union dues out of their reimbursement checks, many providers reported that they had never previously heard about any election or even about a unionization drive.28
Michigan home child-care provider Peggy Mashke explained how she learned about the unionization scheme: “I received a notice in the mail from the UAW congratulating me on my new membership. I was kind of shocked.” Peggy’s husband is a retired Ford worker, but she was confused when she received a letter telling her that she would now be paying dues to the UAW. Peggy explains, “I don’t have a problem with the union. Just not in my home.”29 Sadly, the union unionized her home business whether she wanted it to or not.
Another Michigan child-care provider, Carrie Schlaud, explained her decision to fight being forced into a union on Fox & Friends. “You know,” said Schlaud, “I’m just a mom who decided to care for children in my home. I provide a good service, and I’m able to contribute to the household income, while caring for my own children. And never did I dream I would have to fight the UAW out of my living room.”30
Both Mashke and Schlaud fought in court to be free of UAW control of their home-based business. Amazingly, they actually won in a settlement with the state of Michigan. But this is a rare victory in an unrelenting wave of similar unionization drives across the nation.31
How It Works
But how do states turn independent care providers into government workers so that unions could organize them?
University professors have an interesting way of describing what states have done to convert unorganizable self-employed care providers into union members. A history professor and a feminist studies professor wrote an article together praising the “unusual creativity” that was required to unionize home-based child-care workers. “Workers and their unions,” they write, “also had to compel innovations in labor law and labor policy.”32 The unions certainly had to “compel innovations” in the law, but it wasn’t the workers doing it—many of those workers didn’t find out that they were represented by a union u
ntil after the unionizing election had been held.
A law professor explains that labor unions “perfected a new model of organizing, one capable of representing the workers even as the law views many of them as independent contractors” who couldn’t be organized under current law.33 We might say instead: it took quite a lot of finagling and political favors to convert a bunch of people who work for themselves into government employees so they could be unionized.
A law professor explains that labor unions “perfected a new model of organizing, one capable of representing the workers even as the law views many of them as independent contractors” who couldn’t be organized under current law. We might say instead: it took quite a lot of finagling and political favors to convert a bunch of people who work for themselves into government employees so they could be unionized.
States generally formed a commission, or a government shell entity, to serve as the “employer of record” for the independent care providers.34 If these government shell entities remind you of shell companies that enabled the Enron accounting scandal, you are not far off. This is a legal fiction designed to paper over a union power play. It is cooking the government books. But of course, it’s never a problem when the government cooks its own books.
Once this commission or shell entity was in place, providers were then considered “employees” of this entity.35 The workers could be unionized and the unions could avail themselves of both dues checkoff and forced-dues collection if legal in that state. Thereafter, the fictitious employer would also sit on the other side of the table from the union in any negotiations.36
Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind Page 23
